Windows Clusters for Beginners: From Highly Fearful to Highly Reliable in 75 Minutes! Presented by Mark on twitter copyright Mark Minasi Or… Building fault tolerance: it's not just for rich folks any more

Topics 2

What Clusters Do 3

Do You Trust Your Accountants? 4

Benefits 5

What Do You Need? 6

"Shared Storage" 7

Windows Clusters Basic Prototype 8 shared storage Two or more SQL, Hyper-V, file etc. servers attached to the shared storage acting as "nodes" in the "cluster" SQL databases, virtual machine disks (VHDs), DHCP scopes, regular old files, etc Shared storage allowing both systems to do block I/O on the same sectors One of the servers actually reads/writes the shared storage and is the "active" node; the others just wait for the active one to die, and they're the "passive" nodes… but that changes in some situations, as we'll see HV1 HV2

Cluster Concept: Name and IP 9 The cluster gets a machine name, like \\Cluster1, and a different IP address of its own Clients connect to \\mycluster, not \\fs1 or \\fs2 shared storage file servers \\FS 2 \\FS Cluster name: \\Cluster1 IP address:

To Explain This… 10 Honestly the biggest use of Windows clusters these days works around -- perhaps you guessed it -- Hyper-V clusters. So my explanations and examples will walk you through creating a Hyper-V cluster. The concepts transfer cleanly over to other clusters as well.

Cluster Setup Steps: Overview 11

Step One: Node Setup

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Step Two: Create Shared Storage 14

Test & Create the Cluster 15

Create the Cluster: 1 Name, 1 IP! 16

Cluster Creation w/GUI 17

Name the Nodes 18

Note Who's Not a Node 19

Name the Cluster & Set IP Address 20

Filling in the Cluster Spaces 21

Ready to Go 22

Cluster Setup 23 And the result…

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Step Four: Construct Quorum 25

High Availability: Heartbeats 26

"I'm Not Quite Dead Yet!" 27

Majority Quorums 28 HV2HV1HV3 "I hear three heartbeats!" Every node hears at least two heartbeats, so all is well

Majority Quorums 29 HV2HV1HV3 "I hear two heartbeats… I'm still in the cluster!" "I hear one heartbeat… oops, better drop out of the cluster, just in case!"

But a Two-Node Cluster… 30

In Other Words… 31

Configure Quorum 32

Step Five: Add the Shared Storage 33

So We're Done Now? 34

Cluster Types: understanding active and passive 35

VHD Clusters V1: Active/Passive 36 Four VHDs shared are the bases of four VMs. Only HV1 is running those VMs… HV2 is just waiting for HV1 to die shared storage HV2 HV1 Active node Passi ve node

Active/Passive 37

A Workaround 38

A Better Answer 39

VHD 1 VHD 2 VHD 4 VHD 3 Clusters V2: Active/Active 40 now HV1 is active on VHD1 and VHD3, HV2 on VHD2 and VHD4. If one node fails the other one picks up its VHDs shared storage HV2 HV1 Active node

2012 Changes 41

Final Step: Cluster a VM 42

What Can You Cluster? 43

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And That’s It! 50